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Show HN: Will I run Boston 2025?
- lilfrost 2y agoIt looks like my 5:32 time does not qualify me :(
- qmatch 2y agoTry adjusting the slider! Gives us hope.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoIf you get that down to 5:10 and are an 80+ female then you're golden!
- mauvehaus 2y agoI have a friend who is something like a 6-hour marathoner and has run Boston a couple times for charity. The experience is pretty subpar to hear her tell it. The college students are pretty intoxicated by that point, the organizers are starting to clean up the course and move the runners to the sidewalks, and the course is full of trash where they haven't cleaned up yet. The porta-potties don't have a lot to recommend them either once 30-something-thousand people have come through ahead of you too.
- thenipper 2y agoI used to live on beacon st in Brookline. Every year the marathon was a nightmare. Drunk people on my stoop. Trash everywhere. It was wicked cool to see the old timers and charity runners running even after it got dark. Would always give them a big cheer as they came by.
- JojoFatsani 2y agoAs a spectator, I’ve always had a great time.
- twobitshifter 2y agoDon’t feel bad, being able to run for that long is still 99th percentile.
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- charliebwrites 2y agoAnything 2:50:00 or below is 100% and anything 2:55:00 and above is 0% Is this actually accurate or did I find a bug? If not, such a weird 5 minute window
- ack210 2y agoThe 0% above 2:55 makes sense at least since it's the BAA's new cutoff this year for males <35yo (the default on the calculator):https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/qualify https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/qualify
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- jonnycat 2y agoBut that's for 2026 - the 2025 time qualifying time is 3:00.
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- ggm 2y agoMaybe the question is: should you run the Boston Marathon In 2016, a systematic medical review found that the risk of sudden cardiac death during or immediately after a marathon was between 0.6 and 1.9 deaths per 100,000 participants, varying across the specific studies and the methods used, and not controlling for age or gender. This translates to a few published marathon deaths worldwide in a typical year, although the authors lamented the lack of a central registry for the information. That said, the Boston Marathon has a lower presence in the marathon-death-tables, the bombing aside: That's really not relevant to this. So, if you want to take the aggregate risk (which is between the risk of fatal insect sting, and lightning) of all the Marathons to chose to run, Boston is one of the better ones.
- khuey 2y agoThat's a far better death rate than the original marathon. (1 death per 1 participant according to the tale of Pheidippides.)
- ggm 2y agoYea, I think Cochrane decided that wasn't an adequate sample to include.
- philipwhiuk 2y agoYes yes, discount the fact he'd just finished a battle and ran over 100 miles to get there in the first place. > He ran about 240 km (150 mi) in two days, and then ran back. He then ran the 40 km (25 mi) to the battlefield near Marathon and back to Athens to announce the Greek victory over Persia in the Battle of Marathon (490 BC) with the word νικῶμεν (nikomen[8] "We win!"), as stated by Lucian chairete, nikomen ("hail, we are the winners")[9] and then collapsed and died. But sure, it's the last 25 (50 given both ways) that really killed him, not the other 150 miles.
- jimbob45 2y agoAre those numbers even possible with the resources he’d have had at his disposal? How could he have fueled properly for that effort?
- kibitzor 2y agoContext for those not following running news, The Boston Marathon lowered qualifying times for most prospective runners for 2026 race [0]. Because the Boston Marathon has limited capacity, you can only run if you either: 1) raise $5k+ for a charity (limited spots) 2) run a full marathon below* a qualifying time The reason it's below* is because even if you run under a qualifying time, there may be enough people even faster than you that fill up the available spots. This results in some years where you needed to be many minutes faster than the posted qualifying time to guarantee a spot, and every few years, the BAA (group in charge of Boston Marathon) drops the qualifying times. Note, even though the qualifying times have been dropping, they have been even faster in the past (see the 1980s)[1] As someone that's done the Boston Marathon a few times, I am glad they are trying to find a good balance of reasonable qualifying times for the most participation without dramatically expanding the field. I'm also always surprised with how popular and well known this marathon is given the NYC marathon (and others) are harder to get into, only about 2 of the miles are actually in Boston [2], and the start/finish are so far away making participating a logistic headache. But that could be what gives it the charm and why I'm now thinking about doing 2026 [0] https://apnews.com/article/boston-marathon-qualifying-times-b91feddd41298ca838249780323c395d https://apnews.com/article/boston-marathon-qualifying-times-... [1]https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/qualify/history-qualifying-times https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/qualify/history-qu... [2]https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/boston-marathon-route-map-2024/#:~:text=Mile%2024%20to%20Mile%2025,Boston%20at%20the%2040k%20mark https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/boston-marathon-route-ma....
- erksa 2y agoI can't answer this for everyone, but as someone who has run 5 marathons and is running my 6th in 5 weeks (Frankfurt). Boston has some kind of mythical status among marathoners. You're _not_ really there until you've qualified for Boston. I do not know where this comes from, but what I do know is that QUALIFYING for Boston as a male (33) is a BHAG that's fun to chase after. Boston is the 6th of the 6 Abbot Marathon that are considered the "big" 6. New York, London, Chicago, Boston, Berlin and Tokyo. All the others you either win the lottery our you've 4 of the other ones. Nothing you can really do in 6 conseq years. It's not even the fastest course, but it's the course for those who are "serious" about running as a hobby. Running a marathon isn't enough. Running Boston separates you from the try-hard crowd, with a lack of a better word.
- erksa 2y ago> Our mission is to understand fitness so you can achieve your athletic dreams. Recently, athletes have been gathering lot of data, but nobody has been able to fully leverage these sources to help people become more fit. Strava has an entire data scientist dep devoted to analysing the captured data. They also publish a lot of their thinking around Relative Effort (RE) and other performance metrics. Where do you differ?
- tmulc 2y agoI can't say to much because we are trying to keep our methods stealth, but I think it's better to be last than first in this race. Strava isn't the only company in this field: Garmin, Kaizen, and AI Endurance are just a few. For a while, our race predictions were a lot more accurate than the biggest of these (Garmin, which has a lot more data than Strava), which is probably telling of the difficulty. There isn't an obvious company you go to to tell you about your fitness, but if there was we would have never started our mission.
- vineyardmike 2y agoI wish you luck, because I think this space is about to get a lot more crowded. That said, I suspect that Strava and Apple (and likely even Google) have more data than Garmin. Maybe quality of data is lower (garmin is higher % athletes?). There are a lot of companies planning or starting to tell you about fitness. Oura and Whoop and now Fitbit are happy to give you basic training readiness info. Google will help you plan runs, Apple will give you “training load”. I’m not sure what your target market is, but don’t forget to look broadly. Garmin is favored for training athletes but fitbits and Apple Watches are favored for casual workouts. If you’re trying to train models on metabolic or other physiological training ability, don’t forget to look at non-athletes or early-athletes.
- tmulc 2y agoThanks! In my experience in these things, there are only handful of people with the right ML background implement the products well (it tends to be a blend of domain knowledge, researching ideas in the correct way, and engineering to make the iteration loop fast), and I think our team has that. Hitting the right audience like you mentioned is going to key, too.
- nextworddev 2y agoRan Boston and sub3’ed multiple times and have to say it was worth it. But the training process is all consuming especially if you aren’t naturally talented, like running 75 miles per week, so keep things in perspective
- aeyes 2y agoThis is the kind of information that would be better presented in a simple table. For every age group up to 60 the window between 0% and 100% chance is under 5min.
- tmulc 2y agoThe interactive component was just there so you didn't have to compute the buffer yourself, but I see your point--thanks!
- raldi 2y agoThis would be a lot less confusing if the title were "Will you qualify for Boston 2025?"
- w1 2y agoNote that the root site (https://getfast.ai/ https://getfast.ai/) also has a marathon time predictor, based on your Strava data.
- createaccount99 2y agoAight so I gotta improve my 5k pace by about 1.5min/km and then keep that up for an entire marathon. Though perhaps I'll stick to attempting a 25min 5k first. Catch Boston some other year weep